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News from NCRR
NIH Expands CTSA Consortium
Samuel Klein and Jennifer McCrea offer health and nutrition tips to ten-year-old Van Carter at the Adams Park Elementary School Wellness Fair. Klein is the director of the Clinical Interactions Resources Core at the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences. Photo courtesy of Washington University.
NIH has expanded a national consortium of academic health centers across the country that is transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted. The goal of the consortium, which grew out of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative, is to speed the translation of laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients.
Funded through NCRR’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program, the consortium adds 12 more academic health centers to the 12 that were announced last October. When fully implemented in 2012, the consortium will include 60 institutions, linked together to energize the discipline of clinical and translational research.
The new consortium members are:
- Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio).
- Emory University (Atlanta, Ga.), partnering with Morehouse School of Medicine.
- Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Md.).
- University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.).
- University of Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa).
- University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Mich.).
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, Tex.).
- University of Washington (Seattle, Wash.).
- University of Wisconsin (Madison, Wis.).
- Vanderbilt University, partnering with Meharry Medical College (both in Nashville, Tenn.).
- Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.).
- Weill Cornell Medical College, partnering with Hunter College (both in New York, N.Y.).
The new grantees will further strengthen the consortium’s goal of providing enriched environments to educate and train the next generation of clinical and translational researchers, design improved clinical research informatics tools, support outreach to communities, assemble interdisciplinary teams of researchers, and forge new partnerships with private and public health organizations.
In addition, the new grantees offer unique features and enrich the CTSA program in the following ways:
- Three of the new institutions have formed partnerships with research centers in minority institutions: Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, and Hunter College.
- The CTSAs at three of the new institutions have female principal investigators, helping to increase the role of women in leadership positions.
- The University of Washington is partnering with academic institutions in states supported by NCRR’s Institutional Development Award program to create greater opportunities to reach underserved populations.
- The consortium is integrated with other NCRR and NIH programs. For example, six of the eight National Primate Research Centers are now located at institutions with CTSAs. In addition, 19 of the 24 institutions with CTSAs also have National Cancer Institute-funded cancer centers.
Total funding for these new awards will be approximately $574 million. This total represents a nearly five-year budget period. A third funding opportunity announcement for CTSAs has been issued, calling for the next round of applications to be submitted by November 7, 2007, with the awards expected in June 2008.
This funding announcement and other information about the CTSA program are available on the CTSA consortium web site.
